Preserving the Unwanted? How Vienna’s Informal Fringe was studied, discussed, and reformed after 1945

Abstract

After the end of the First World War, many of Vienna’s two million inhabitants were suffering from famine, cold, disease, and desperate housing conditions. Many resorted to self-empowerment: Illegal forest clearings, vegetable gardens, and the building of basic shacks on squatted land expanded to the Danube floodplain, the alpine foothills, and the wastelands on the outskirts of the city. Albeit reduced in scale, this type of “internal colonization” (Robert Hoffmann) would reoccur during the world economic crisis of the thirties and in the precarious years during and after the Second World War. In the late 1940s it became clear that this transformation of the city’s peripheries, unwanted by authorities and planners, could not be rolled back in its entirety. While some important shantytowns were cleared, from the 1950s to the late 1990s most former illegal settlements were upgraded, connected to public utilities and legalised in terms of zoning and construction law. Consequently, former Bretteldörfer (shantytowns) began to transform into (more or less) regular suburban residential areas. This chapter elaborates on this largely unknown history of Vienna, focusing on the period of postwar reconstruction from around 1945 to 1965. It discusses findings of the research project Wien informell (2021–2023), particularly those that concern the public and expert debates on the legacy of Vienna’s “wild” fringe; surveys of its social, urbanistic, and architectural forms; and proposed reform concepts. It thus sheds new light on an important, yet often neglected aspect of a major European city in post-war transition. Not only are debates on urban sprawl and the disintegration of peripheral urban space older than is commonly thought of. Today’s “suburban archipelago” is the result of a long period of mitigation and mediation between planned and unplanned developments, while the (re-)organization of the urban fringe remains as important as ever.